Bar Code

N. Joseph Woodland, Inventor of the Bar Code, Dies at 91 | In The New York Times on Friday, Margalit Fox reports on the life of N. Joseph Woodland, who invented the bar code, and who died last Sunday at age 91.

Mr. Woodward was a graduate student when he and a classmate, Bernard Silver, created a technology - based on a printed series of wide and narrow striations - that encoded consumer-product information for optical scanning.

Their idea, developed in the late 1940s and patented 60 years ago this fall, turned out to be ahead of its time -- unworkable until other technologies were developed. But it would eventually give rise to the universal product code, or U.P.C., as the staggeringly prevalent rectangular bar code is officially known.

The code now adorns tens of millions of different items, scanned in retail establishments around the world at the rate of more than five billion times a day.

Mr. Woodland and Mr. Silver were awarded a patent for their invention in 1952, and sold the patent to Philco for $15,000 -- all the money they ever made from it. The patent expired in the 1960s, and much later, was turned into the ubiquitous bar code.